NEW YORK (BP)–Under the watchful eye of opponents of world government, heads of state from 150 countries gathered in New York Sept. 6 for the United Nations Millennium Summit, a three-day event organizers say is meant to combat war, poverty and disease.
According to the CNSNews.com Internet news service, a draft declaration that world leaders are expected to approve at the end of the week will commit them to cut by half in 15 years the number of people in the world who live on less than $1 a day. The number of impoverished people worldwide currently is estimated by U.N. officials at over 1 billion.
An equal number — many of them the same ones — do not have access to clean water. Their number also should be cut in half by 2015, leaders are expected to pledge at the end of the summit.
Some U.N. observers are watching the Millennium Summit closely to see if the international body is going to take steps toward global governance.
“The blueprint for world government will not come out of this summit,” Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the US Business and Industry Council and author of a soon-to-be-published book about globalization, “The Race to the Bottom,” told CNSNews.com “But this is one more development in an ongoing process by the world government lobby to bring us closer to world government.”
The biggest cost to the United States of a world government “is [losing] our sovereignty over our own laws and regulations,” Tonelson said.
“We also lose valuable freedom of action to deal with international problems. We are increasingly tied down to large and unwieldy international coalitions which, although they might not be capable of decisive action, can often prevent us from acting effectively in our own interests,” he added.
Of particular concern to environmental policy experts is a proposal by the French government to create a world environmental organization. This proposal — for an Earth Charter — also has the backing of a number of environmental policy experts in the camp of Democratic presidential contender Al Gore.
Rather than strive for complicated international agreements such at the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, a “world environmental organization” would make the rules as it went along, subjecting governments to its own arbitrary standards, analysts warn.
“Once you have these people in place, they’ll find something to do,” Myron Ebell, director of global warming policy with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told CNSNews.com.
“I’m concerned that they might decide to redo Kyoto. They may say they’re going to skip the targets and instead attempt to create the framework and the institution that will tell us what the targets are. They’ll try to figure out how to grab some power away from national governments and away from people,” Ebell said.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is stressing his vision of a benevolent globalization — working with corporations and grassroots groups.
“We all have to accept that the business world and the private sector have enormous power in today’s world,” Annan said. “They are the ones who are creating wealth. They are the ones who have the money, the technology and the management to carry forward quite a lot of the things we are talking about.”
World leaders will iron out details of their Charter for Global Democracy, which includes 12 areas “for urgent action.” Supporters of the charter want to “monitor and regulate international corporations and financial institutions;” “give UN institutions additional … revenue;” “ratify the international criminal court” proposal; and “create an international environmental court.”
Observers also are alarmed at U.N. recommendations to create a global taxing system, establish an international court and eliminate any allowance for permanent member status and veto power in the Security Council, privileges the United States currently shares with several other countries.
“They’ll continue to promote these trial balloons, and they will gradually get governments so desensitized to what’s happening that they’ll be able to slip various things through,” Tonelson said of the U.N. tendency toward a one-world government. “They have a fairly long time horizon, even though they sometimes sound very impatient, and they are confident time is on their side.”
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Morahan is a senior staff writer with CNSNews.com. Used by permission.
